A variety of hand-held presses are utilized in the canvas products industry. As an example, hand-held presses are indispensable to businesses which supply boat covers and awnings. For such suppliers, on-site repairs are customary. Thus, small, lightweight, hand-held presses have been developed to enable repairs of damaged fasteners without necessitating the return of a boat cover or awning to the fabrication shop.
Existing hand-held presses typically utilize a toggle-type mechanism to advance the die members relative to one another. A disadvantage of this type of mechanism is that die travel is very limited and alignment of the dies relative to one another is made more difficult by the requisite number of joints in the mechanism.
A principal object of the invention is therefore to provide a lightweight, low cost, hand-held press which permits a relatively large amount of die travel while maintaining precise die axial alignment.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a press able to exert high axial loads on the dies throughout its range of travel and still permit easy movement of the die elements toward and apart from one another when no load is applied.
A further object of the present invention to provide a hand-held press which can be operated in essentially one hand, which thus frees the user's other hand and allows the user to brace the fabric in which the fastener is installed.
Yet another object of the present invention is to provide a hand-held press which can install thousands of fasteners without significant wear or deterioration and maintain die alignment.
Other and further objects of the invention, together with the invention's novel features will be more fully appreciated with reference to the accompanying drawings and the description of the preferred embodiment.